#37 - Stanton Wong: RESET, Transforming Indoor Air Quality Monitoring - Technological Innovations, Health Impacts, and Sustainable Practices

This week, the President of RESET, Stanton Wong, joins us from Shanghai. 

We discuss the evolution of low-cost sensors and their impact on what we now call healthy buildings.

The development of the reset standard from the very early days of connected devices: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The importance of continuous measurement in building performance and the evolution of Reset into sustainability and circularity.

A set of building standards measuring the performance of buildings. RESET’s assessment tools & services measure and benchmark embodied and operational carbon, including the circularity and health impact of materials in the built environment and continuous monitoring of air quality, energy, water, and waste, to develop actionable, long-term strategies.

Stanton has been in sustainability for 10+ years. He has a software and product design background and is a futurist passionate about sustainability, the environment, technology, education, and health.

I have been really excited about talking to Stranton, he has been there from the very beginning of continuous monitoring as we understand it today, and Reset is still the benchmark for low cost air quality devices in real estate.

Chapters

• 0:00 Evolution of Indoor Air Quality Monitoring
• 16:22 Advancements in Indoor Air Quality Monitoring
• 32:59 Creating Sustainable and Healthy Companies
• 38:11 Implementing ESG Into Organizational DNA
• 49:51 Low-Cost Air Quality Monitoring Market
• 1:07:19 Measuring and Monitoring Embodied Sustainability
• 1:14:59 Transparency and Accountability in Sustainability
• 1:20:50 Global Expansion of Reset Air Standards
• 1:29:04 Monitoring Air Quality and Standards
• 1:45:25 Building Community Support for Sustainable Companies

Transcript

Simon : 0:00

Air quality matters inside our buildings and out, and we already have many of the tools we need to make a difference. The conversations we have and how we share this knowledge is the key to our success. I'm Simon Jones and this is episode 37 of the Air Quality Matters podcast, coming up a conversation with Stanton Wong, joining this week from Shanghai the president of Reset, stanton Wong. We discuss the evolution of low-cost sensors and their impact on what we now call healthy buildings. The development of the Reset standard from the very early days of connected devices, the good, the bad and the ugly and the importance of continuous measurement in building performance and the evolution of the reset standard into sustainability and circularity. A set of building standards measuring the performance of buildings.

Simon : 1:24

Reset's assessment tools and services measure and benchmark embodied and operational carbon, including the circularity and health impact of materials in the built environment, and continuous monitoring of air quality, energy, water and waste to develop actionable long-term strategies. Stanton has been in sustainability for well over 10 years. He has a software and product design background and is a futurist passionate about sustainability, the environment, technology, education and health. I've been really excited to talk to Stanton. He has been there from the very beginning of continuous monitoring. As we understand it today and today, reset is the benchmark for low-cost air quality devices in real estate. Thanks for listening. As always, do check out the sponsors in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet. This is a conversation with Stanton Wong.

Stanton: 2:36

I think it's a great kind of starting conversation, because indoor air quality monitoring has come a long way. Originally, when we were first even thinking about this, all we saw were really really expensive outdoor air quality monitors and the kind of switch that went in our head to make us think about indoor air quality back in the day, around 2013, 2014, was there was a Chinese documentary called Under the Dome and it was essentially telling everyone around China that the fog that you saw outside was not fog, but it was air pollution. It was PM 2.5. No one knew what PM was. No one knew what PM 2.5 was at the time and this was a shock to the system because, especially in Beijing Beijing was the air quality there was terrible and no one knew what was actually happening because there was no information and that kind of brought air quality front of mind and the actual genesis of reset um air was actually a um.

Stanton: 3:37

So I'm going on a bit of a segue, but it kind of sucks for for how this kind of started and why we care about air quality, continuous air quality monitoring. The genesis of it was actually from a client. They were actually an embassy and one of their employees got sick and they blamed on air quality because there was no function for filtration that was actually measurable and so they just assumed I'm in China, the air quality is really bad. Part of the reason I'm sick is because of the air quality. So they actually bought really cheap sensors and monitors to put in the office on their desk. The measurements were really bad and then they sued their company or they sued their embassy. So that's how it started.

Stanton: 4:28

And then the embassy found us through a partner and basically asked what can we do to prevent this issue? And so the partnership was actually with an air solutions company and we came in as a third party verification um company and from our perspective the only way to really know was with some kind of continuous monitoring, because back then people were doing spot tests all the time, um, but spot tests don't give you information over time and so kind of the beginning of what we were looking at was continuous monitoring to know how things happened over time, to give the embassy the enough information to basically discount other people bringing in sensors and saying like the air quality is bad because their data is now third-party verified and when we first started there were no sensors. And so actually the first two monitors of this Reset Grade B class that we talk about in our certification we were part of the people who helped design it because it just didn't exist.

Simon : 5:36

Yeah, it's probably hard for people to put that into context, but you know, I suppose we came into covid in 2019. Before that, really, continuous monitoring of buildings was predominantly the the field of academia and it would have been the deployment of fairly research grade-esque type sensors or, at the very least, what you would call category a calibratable devices, that kind of middle tier device you know from the likes of tsi and other instrumentation companies that have been going in with with very heavy academic quality assurance behind it and so on. Outside of that, we we were really fixed within the world of data logging. You know so. So we would have been measuring co2 and humidity and temperature back post 2010 I suppose, with sometimes battery devices but mostly powered data loggers, and again, that would have required repeat visits into buildings, arranging access, deployment. People would pull stuff out of walls and you wouldn't know stuff had failed until you went back to do the study.

Simon : 6:53

Um, very clunky world of monitoring indoor air quality. And you blink and we're in 2024 and it just seems like indoor environmental monitoring is ubiquitous and easy somehow. Um so so reset has been in this really interesting position from that early phase of going. Well, we don't really have a standard to test these monitors? Not that many exist, but if we have one in our hand, what are we testing it against? How do we say that this is a good or bad or indifferent product? Um, and the marketplace is looking for something to tell them that something is good or bad or indifferent, and there isn't really anything to benchmark it in, so you really were working with a blank piece of paper back then. I guess it's going right. Where do we start?

Stanton: 7:49

even, yeah, I think it was lucky. Lucky is a weird word here, but the the way I think it think of it is. We were in a interesting position where we had a client and a partner who was in the space and they had a very clear need and so for us we kind of at the beginning, we're an integrator. More than anything, we're trying to figure out oh, these sensors work, these monitors can come together, because we're working with literally, sensors. Back then it wasn't a full product yet. The first time we saw a prototype from one of the partners that we initially worked with, there was no outer casing, it was just literally the sensors on the motherboard and it was all out in the open. So we're working with them through that and trying to put these into offices, get longer-term measurements, see how they performed over time.

Stanton: 8:40

And the way we wrote our standard was also interesting because we came at it purely from a continuous monitoring perspective.

Stanton: 8:49

The idea was we saw that every single project needed some different kind of solution, because we're working with a solutions company as we're learning about the process, and we saw that every solution was slightly different and that kind of pushed us towards looking at performance data more than looking at any kind of solutions-based criteria for a standard of measuring, and I think the standard also evolved, because the first version of the standard that's not really public anymore was actually just the monitor standard.

Stanton: 9:23

It was just requirements for what we wanted to see for the monitor as we were building it together and looking at what the requirements were to make sure the solutions that were implemented actually were actually working. So what kind of data would we need to collect to verify that it's working and also to make sure that when it's averaged out we're high um, like really weird numbers that don't make any sense, because when we first started the sensors were not as good as they are today and we would have weird numbers that happen once in a while and so smoothing some of that out was important for um and that's why we required data to be logged more often than like once an hour.

Simon : 10:06

Yeah, I think that's probably an interesting perspective for people to understand as well is not just the invention of the technology, but the improvements and iterations of the accuracy of that tech over the last 10 years. It's an interesting place for you to have started, where there were were so many variables. Um, even with some of the basic technology the ndir sensors and the voc sensors you'd get some very funky numbers if you weren't paying close attention. Um. So I mean, interestingly, you've where you are today. I guess you've not not come into this with your eyes closed. You've come from a period of time where you've had to deal with a lot of variability, so you understand very well the boundary conditions of the capabilities of this technology, because you've seen it at its worst and you've seen it improve over time worst and you've seen it improve over time.

Stanton: 11:10

Yes, when we first started testing other people's monitors that weren't ours, it was very interesting to see what got sent over to us. The most interesting one, I think, was a sensor that didn't actually have a VOC sensor. They reported that they were reading VOC, but there was no VOC sensor. They had an algorithm that took CO2 data, randomized it to a certain extent and then gave you a VOC number. There's now the opposite. I've been hearing this recently that there's an eCO2, which is using VOC data to create CO2 data, which to me makes even less sense because CO2 sensors are not expensive and they're relatively accurate, much more so than VOC sensors. So that doesn't really make sense to me. But back then that sensor was interesting because it was the first time we saw VOC data. That made absolutely zero sense Because the way we test is we always ask for multiple monitors of the same brand and make to be placed on the same counter within kind of one meter of each other, and the idea is, at the very least we want to make sure the manufacturer of this product they are capable of making monitors.

Stanton: 12:20

So let's say, you're a project you're going to buy probably one brand and make of monitors. You're not going to buy like five different monitors from five different brands installed in one office. So if you install these monitors, you would at least have a zero-based reference for all of these that they're going to perform very, very similarly. That was our expectation for what we're testing for, and when you get monitors that don't have real data, nothing will match. So none of the trends for any of the VOC sensors of those monitors made any sense to us, and so after multiple conversations with the company, we realized they didn't have a VOC sensor and it was all made up data based on CO2. So that's interesting as to what was available back then.

Stanton: 13:03

I think in terms of evolution of the actual sensors themselves, the main difference from what the market was like back then and what it is like now is that the sensors are more developed, so it's more plug and play there is. If you're building a product, you can buy the sensors, they give you all the information on how to use it, how to calibrate, et cetera. A lot of it's auto-calibrate even, and you just plug it in, and that has made the product building significantly easier. I think it was much harder back then because there was just less information, and so I would say that's the biggest difference from then and now. I would say that's the biggest difference from then and now, and the hardest part, I think, is going to be demonstrating, aside from CO2, temperature and humidity, that the other sensors are all good, when the readings with certain different calibrations can be vastly different from each other.

Simon : 13:59

Yeah, and I think that's just the real politic of electronics going out into the built environment is there's such huge variability in environments. As a manufacturer you can convince yourself that something makes sense because you have a particular worldview or an experience of dealing with a particular environment. And it's not until these sensors go out into the wild for years on end do you start to understand the true boundary conditions of their potential. And I think that's the period of time that we're going through now. We've seen it. Even with the more established sensors like CO2, with pretty robust automatic baseline calibration. We understand much better now than we did even five years ago what the boundary conditions of those capabilities, those logics are.

Simon : 14:53

Because there are many, many environments that these sensors go into where they may not see an outside level of parts per million for long periods of time.

Simon : 15:02

So you start to experience drift and funny numbers again where you've got used to seeing real, reliable numbers, and you start to understand the capabilities of this tech much more and more. So I think we're on pretty solid ground now with a lot of the low-cost sensors. We understand much better than we do, certainly, the core sensors that we've been using that have been within reset, for example, like CO2 and particularly particulate matter, co2, temperature and humidity. We'll come onto VOCs a bit later on, but I think there's an interesting conversation there to be had, because I think we're at this frontier again now with low cost sensors, with electrochemical sensors, where we're starting to see speciated interest of particular vocs like formaldehydes and noxes and ozones and things like that, and I think we're again at that kind of frontier period again where we're trying to understand where these boundary conditions are. I guess you're getting this you must be seeing that coming across your desk now an increasing interest in this tech, now zeroing in on particular pollutants of interest.

Stanton: 16:15

Yeah, a couple of years ago, before COVID, we were already getting a lot of interest around formaldehyde. The issue with formaldehyde is the sensors calibrated for formaldehyde do extremely well in the lab, but the real world is not the lab.

Stanton: 16:31

And then you're getting numbers that show oh, formaldehyde is through the roof, but there is no formaldehyde in the space, but there was some other VOC chemical near the sensor that just spiked it. So part of the reason that we didn't really go that route, as in we didn't promote that route, was because we didn't see sensors that were capable of really clearly isolating formaldehyde without misrepresenting what the air quality was like. Voc is slightly more fuzzy. We can say, oh, voc is very high, let's go look for the reason why it's high, and then you kind of use better technology, more specific technology, to figure out what the situation might be. But if you're using formaldehyde sensors that are not honest in just checking for formaldehyde but can be reactive to other substances, it becomes a mess.

Stanton: 17:26

And so we are starting to see better performing formaldehyde sensors, significantly better performing formaldehyde sensors, to the point where we would be happy to make it an optional piece to the standard where, if you're going for reset air, aside from the five parameters that we require, you can now add in others, including ozone, nox, sox, radon, anything that is tied to air quality and can be monitored the same way. We think it's worth including. Yeah, and the interesting stuff that I'm starting here, which was aside from formaldehyde, is that they're starting to leverage multiple VOC sensors to be put together as a unit and each of them are calibrated against different VOCs, and using that to be even more accurate with detecting certain types of VOCs based on how much variance there is between the sensors. How much variance?

Simon : 18:24

there is between the sensors. So using differential in what you're reading to try and understand bands of VOCs, even like maybe aldehydes versus something else like you might start to be able to. I think the interesting thing with these low-cost sensors and it's honestly probably the same with some of the other things we're measuring as well that when you understand the capabilities and the boundary possibilities of these products really they're there to instigate workflows you know the data in of itself isn't of value unless it answers a what? Next question? Generally, and I think with all of this stuff, it isn't so much whether or not you're above or below a WHO standard, because the reality is, even with a PM sensor, to say that you're below 50 micrograms of anything with a low cost sensor and you've got a plus or minus five microgram variance on a product and a percentage variance on it, you're going to be hard pushed to say you're definitively above or below a singular number.

Simon : 19:36

But what these sensors are very good at, a bit like health wearables, is saying you should probably go and see your doctor, you know, or there's a workflow that needs to be stimulated here and I think the interesting thing with the VOC ones will be perhaps just a more refined workflow. It's not that you're saying definitively that your formaldehyde is above a WHO limit. You're saying I think there's a formaldehyde workflow that might need to be started here, where there's definitively something you do when that's triggered and it might be that you do a speciated formaldehyde test and some form of assessment of the workspace, for example. You know, I think that's where it will head ultimately.

Stanton: 20:20

I completely agree. I think it's moving in that direction in healthcare in general, moving more towards preventative medicine rather than just I have lost a term but basically what we have as medicine today, which is you have a problem and you go get it fixed. If you can discover the problems beforehand and be proactive about it, you actually save more money in the long run. But it's not. The ROI can't be measured until bad things happen, and if you're preventative about it, bad things don't happen nearly as much, so then it's even harder to measure the ROI. I think, for having done this, for trying to push a standard around continuous air quality monitoring for health purposes, the hardest part has been ROI. It's just not as straightforward as sustainability measurements where you can calculate literally for every watt hour that you're saving. That's a dollar right. You can measure that in money. With health it's much harder.

Simon : 21:17

No, I agree completely and I've said this for a long time. I mean, even with some of the environmental data that you're capturing on thermal comfort, temperature and humidity and things like that, you can translate that very quickly into building performance data and helps you to understand energy efficiency and a direct straight line to ROI of investment straight line to ROI of investment. The challenge with health data is that it's very difficult to bring that down to an individual level, a direct ROI on an individual and certainly at a building level. Very difficult to. We started to see work from the likes of Harvard, chan public health and the whole healthy buildings thing of Joseph Allen of starting to develop ROIs for cognitive performance and well-being in the workplace, but it's still relatively fuzzy because it relies on questionnaires and performance checks. It's quite hard to draw that line.

Simon : 22:20

Where I think we're making much more progress is at a public health level, at a population health level. We understand much better now than we did even 10 years ago the impacts of indoor air quality per 100,000 of the population. Building level. You are able to say now with quite high degrees of confidence that formaldehyde is costing society x and nitrogen dioxide is costing society y and and so on, and that that helps the conversation. I think where it gets interesting is the more and more we can bring it down to a building level. I don't know if you saw the work that Ben Jones and Max Sherman were doing with ASHRAE, where they started to develop harm intensities for certain pollutants of interest. So they're now able to say you know, a pollution level of X with nitrogen dioxide has a harm intensity of Y, and so much so that ASHRAE are developing amendments to look at health indices, basically as a way of measuring building performance rather than flow rates. We're getting there, I think.

Stanton: 23:34

That's really awesome. There's a lot of details to go into. For example, part of the difference between, for example, who's number and other numbers is your timeframe. So is it averaged over an entire year? Is it averaged over a day? And the intensity part is also kind of tied to that. How long are you in a space for that has a formaldehyde level of whatever, a VOC level or even a CO2 level of a certain number? Because if you're only in there for two hours it's probably not a big deal. But if you're there eight hours a day for 300 days a year, and it's always at that level, that's really going to cut down on your life and it's something that's invisible. It's even at least with outdoor air PM 2.5, you can see it. Indoor you can't see, because it's just because there's not enough distance for you to kind of get that blurriness in the air.

Simon : 24:36

So with air quality in indoor environments, aside from smell, which most of these don't even have a smell it's almost completely undetectable, and you're probably one of the few people that has context both sides of COVID here, when it comes to healthy buildings and the pitch to organizations and buildings, because I think a lot of organizations are struggling, including the bigger sensor manufacturers, in trying to figure where we are on the journey at the moment in awareness, because we've had this massive blip in the middle of covid and everybody panicking and sensors and air cleaners going in everywhere and everybody wondering now why that's not continued. Um, you've seen it from the very beginning, where I imagine there was a lot of blank stares and scratching of heads going what are you on about? Stanton healthy, what now? Um, so you've seen it from zero to where we are. Where's your sense as to where we are on that trajectory, taking into account this, this blip or this step change that we saw?

Stanton: 25:33

2019 to 2022 the exciting thing, I think, is that awareness is up significantly. I don't think people even realize the flu was airborne before, and so the idea that people now think, oh, indoor air like having to make sure that indoor air is clean, either through fresh air or good filtration can prevent you getting the flu not even COVID just it can prevent you from getting the flu. I think that awareness has gone a long way in comparison to before COVID. The other thing aside from that is I think there's an awareness that a building automation for air quality is more valuable than before. One of the best case studies I heard of was during COVID.

Stanton: 26:25

Every government was still learning about this airborne disease, and so their rule was, regardless of what's happening, if the building is open 24-7, you have to have your fresh air running 24-7. If the building is open at max capacity open at max capacity, and this is okay during the spring or autumn when it's more tempered outside. But if it's the winter, there's no way your system is designed to heat that much air coming in, and so people are less comfortable inside. Less comfortable means lower immune system, which means they're more susceptible to a smaller dose of airborne viruses that will make them sick of airborne viruses that will make them sick. And so one thing that I saw was a landlord essentially started using the system that they had set up. They were a recent accredited building. They had all the CO2 sensors for corn shell in place and they were using that to measure how many people are in the building and if CO2 levels are very low on a certain floor, that means there's probably no one in the building or there's a very few people, and so with that number, they decreased the amount of fresh air that was being brought in, and they could argue for it because they could clearly see that there was no one in the building or no one in that area of the building.

Stanton: 27:41

There's no need to bring this much fresh air in that area of the building. There's no need to bring this much fresh air. And if you can keep the indoor space more temperate, more comfortable, you don't damage the immune system as much, you don't stress the immune system as much, which means that there's even less chance of someone getting sick. There's a lot of logic that requires a couple jumps. It's just uh, a equals b kind of thing. Um, and having this experience of going through a situation where you're pushed to the extreme is a good way to test what uh what air quality sensors can do for a building, if they can automate it yeah, yeah, and, and what they can't do.

Simon : 28:21

And I and I think one of the interesting things around a conversation of indoor air quality monitoring. Long before this, I've been involved in demand-controlled ventilation for nearly a decade and a half and the interesting thing about that demand control ventilation stimulates the systems thinking that you wouldn't have otherwise. You know, but what? What happens if the co2 is low because I don't have anybody in there, but those that are in there are now being exposed to other background pollutants because I've reduced the air change rate based on occupancy? And what about if I'm increasing the flow rate and the outdoor conditions are poor and I'm actually bringing in more pollution?

Simon : 29:11

And what about and these are fantastic systems thinking conversations to be having about an indoor environment that, quite frankly, you just don't have. If it's just a regulation to achieve X and nobody probably ever achieved it anyway and nobody checked so, happy days. As long as it's just a regulation to achieve X and nobody probably ever achieved it anyway and nobody checked so, happy days. As long as it's not making a noise and I'm not too hot or cold, nobody complains. So I think those conversations we're having now about well, what about what if? And what happens. Here are really healthy conversations to be have, and they also test these boundary conditions of these systems and the sensors in a much better way than we were getting if we were just just running a system at a flat rate yeah, the another fun story was we went to visit a building and we discovered that the facilities team had a KPI set to lower energy usage and their solution was to turn off the air quality system.

Stanton: 30:14

So they brought in much less fresh air than they're supposed to, based on the design of the building, and that's how they hit their KPI on lowering energy consumption for the core central systems. And the reality is that if there's nothing measuring something that you care about, or if you're not measuring it, you don't care about it because you can't. There's nothing you can see to see, there's nothing to do to see what the actual results are. And that comes back down to kind of our vision of where we think we need to go, and it's. You got to start off with a base layer of data and measurements that you can use for KPI purposes, because then you can start setting goals for your building or your company, etc. If you don't have these numbers that are measuring, it's hard to establish anything that you can verify whether or not you're successful or not.

Simon : 31:09

Yeah, and I think the interesting thing about continuous monitoring is is it takes it beyond the conversation of achieving a well standard or just something when you first move into a building or that you got a badge on the front door of X or y when you, when you first take over a place or leasing it. That continuous monitoring asks the question of what value does this bring on an ongoing basis, and that's probably an interesting question to ask you, stanton, is that it? It seems to me, anyway, that a lot of the progress of environmental monitoring over the last few years has been because we can, principally that it's become much more cost effective. There's you get a champion that buys into the idea, little white boxes going all over the building and we can start to monitor it. Somebody's got a dashboard with lots of very pretty ziggy zaggy lines on it that they can see the meeting rooms for the first time, and then that interest wanes and that person might move on.

Simon : 32:12

And next budget season the question comes what value is this bringing us? So, as an organization that's been there for so long now, are you seeing those same questions being asked in the marketplace, this that what value does this bring us on an ongoing basis and where's the success been for organizations that have successfully answered that question? Because that's, for me, is the big. What next question for the industry? I think people get that it's possible. I think people get that you can benchmark a building. I don't think people quite get yet what the continuous value of that is for them over the longer term this is.

Stanton: 32:59

This is a million dollar question, because this is the business part of this business which is, I think, the hardest part. The educational, tech-related stuff, I think, is much easier to handle than this part. The scenario where companies drop the ball happens very, very often, and it's because people don't stay in the same company forever, and so whoever was a champion initially, if they leave, then it's lost, unless it gets built into DNA, and I think that's the hard part with sustainability, with health, with everything. It's not about what you're capable of doing now, but it's can you build it into the DNA of the company, to the DNA of the company? The companies that have been successful have used this as a reason to implement certain measures into the DNA of the company.

Stanton: 33:53

So one of the case studies for how a landlord from Hong Kong pushed all their facilities teams to actually care about air quality was they implemented this certification. It's third party where the facilities team really doesn't have any way to fake the data, and so they were forced to hit a certain KPI. They had an air quality KPI, the same way that other facilities team that had an energy KPI had right. So now, instead of lowering your energy bill to, sorry, turning off your air quality systems to lower energy bill. You're actively trying to figure out how to make sure that we hit this minimum requirement of air quality for your building. Other scenarios have been using Reset as a kind of starting point to figure out how do we start monitoring things. So we're a proactive facilities team where, instead of the tenants coming to us to tell us that they have an air quality problem, we know beforehand that there is an air quality problem and we can solve it for them. So the facilities team or a landlord that is operating a building like that will make tenants feel much more taken care of and, I think, in general, does the landlord. It's a leadership point for the landlord to be able to take this step because it's an investment.

Stanton: 35:16

And the other thing that we've been seeing is, in this current market it is harder to get investment for anything. Everyone's budget strings are significantly tighter and the ones that we've seen invest into this are companies who are doing slightly better. They're willing to invest moving forward because they have higher percentages of occupancy. They want to stand out, they want to improve their building. They want to stand out, they want to improve their building.

Stanton: 35:44

But generally, I think the key message, as far as I've seen, is if you want to do things right, if you want it to maintain in the long run, you have to build into the DNA. That's also part of the reason why we have our operational certification be ongoing. There is an ongoing data audit that you have to pay for every year. If you stop paying for it, it just leaves the KPI picture. No one knows what's going on anymore. But if you're paying for it, someone's asking questions every single year. What's happening with this? Are we still doing it? At least, even if they don't continue the certification, at least they're asking those questions. That's a spark for thinking about this.

Simon : 36:27

Yeah, at least it comes up in a management meeting once a quarter or at the end of the year to say hang on a minute, the KPI this last year was X and we missed it, and we missed it again this year. What's going on, chaps? You know there's something amiss here. Does this need fixing? Think amiss here, does this need fixing?

Simon : 36:46

You raised two interesting points there and it's kind of around that to tease out a little bit what, what we mean by the dna of an organization, because obviously, particularly in the type of real estate that I'm guessing you're working, there's a lot of split incentives, um, with what's valuable to whom and to when, and there's there are two things often going on.

Simon : 37:04

There's the carrot and the stick. There's the development of standards and regulations and legislation that's ongoing. It's slow but it's progressive, and what was an aspirational target 10 years all of us 10 years ago, all of a sudden now is a minimum requirement, and so you have to be careful. It's like a rising tide. It creeps up on you, um. But then you have this, this carrot element as well, this aspiration of an organization to do the right thing or to have certain processes in place that are looking, I'll have a social impact, which which we'll come on to later, really, which kind of falls within the whole ESG thing as well, I guess, is that what is basically framed around your thing. Ultimately, that DNA, it's the obligation and the aspiration part of the business. The combination of those two things effectively makes up the DNA of why somebody would proactively get involved in this.

Stanton: 38:07

Yeah, I think both of them are a key factor to it. The idea that I lean towards is a lot of companies talk about going for net zero, where they have some kind of target for 2030 or 2040, 2050, etc. The thing that we've seen, though, is that they're very good at marketing, but marketing is not sustainable in the sense that it doesn't keep going. It's a campaign. It happens once and you're done, and I think part of it is also traditional standards. Traditional building standards have been leveraged in the same way, because it's a minimum requirement, and the minimum requirement is getting all these points to get you gold, silver, platinum, et cetera, and once you have it, use it for marketing and then that's it. Your facilities team do not have to follow the rules. No one else really needs to follow the rules afterwards, because no one's checking, and that's essentially something that's not in the DNA of the company. Marketing used it for a purpose, they did their sales, they did their business on it and they're done, and I think a lot of companies who have been talking about net zero or carbon neutrality or anything that's ESG focused that can be measured in some way, they've either been kicking in the can down the road because it's 10 years away and it's not 10 years anymore, it's a little bit over five years now, but it's it's. Time moves a lot faster than you think because to get the momentum going takes a long time. There's so many layers of people to convince, especially if you're a large organization, um, and your budgets are not going to be always loose or loose enough for you to spend on this kind of stuff. You're going to be cutting budgets and this is going to be one of the things you cut. Unless it's built into the DNA, as in, it's something that is central to what we believe the company should be responsible for. We also believe that we can use this content as part of our messaging in terms of what our company is.

Stanton: 40:04

The difference between marketing with green building standards or ESG and having ESG as your DNA, and then marketing what you've done because it's part of your DNA. Those are two different things, because one is more of a one-time campaign. The other is part of what you're doing as part of a company. It's in your DNA time campaign. The other is part of what you're doing as part of a company. It's in your DNA, and I think it does take a long time to switch from one to the other and to get not just everyone bought in but even your marketing team. To figure out how to talk about this over and over again with metrics that are not greenwashable. It takes time. There's a lot of people that you need to convince internally in a company, and so I guess talking about DNA is really just. Everyone understands how this applies to the betterment of the company and it's not just a one-off campaign, because ESG is a fancy word for doing something good for the world a fancy word for doing something good for the world.

Simon : 41:09

Yeah, I've always kind of aligned it in my own mental frame as it's organizational change management in its scale. It's not project orientated. To embed something in the DNA of an organization is organizational change management, and that's a complex, long-term, continuous, incremental improvement process. It's not something that you just go in just because you've convinced the director of x, y and z that this is a good idea, that you've done your job. Um, in your experience over the years, is there a kind of a a minimum level within an organization you feel you need to be having conversations with where you've got some confidence this is going to bed in? Or is it more cross departmental than that that you know that you find it? It's not just the case of having the ceo and a couple of c-suite people bought in. There's a a certain grouping of people you like to see have got this fundamentally before you can say yes. I think this is nailed here from what we've seen there's always a champion yeah and it has to start there.

Stanton: 42:13

And the higher the champion is in terms of the org chart, the easier it is for them to push. So the, for example, the kpi one um that landlord it was from the CEO. The CEO said we're going to do this, we're going to use this to set a KPI for our facilities team. Let's get it done. And it was done. It was very, very easy conversation once they bought into it.

Stanton: 42:38

Another story is head of engineering.

Stanton: 42:43

They were pushing for it, but they have to present that to the board and the board would have to approve it. So there's constant conversations and they actually used Reset to formalize it in the sense that before they were just talking about air quality monitoring, but now they can celebrate it with certification, and so that helped them push it over the line for the board. As you get lower, then it's more localized. So you're doing it for an office or something, you're testing it out and it becomes more of a internal DNA adjustment in the sense that they're trying to show something that is good for the company and also leverage that to get promoted and there's a double incentive there. But I think those are valuable as well because in those situations the large organization is probably never going to be going in that direction. The CEO levels or the C-suite, even director levels, this is not something they're looking at, and so it takes some of the innovative employees to really highlight this. And I think again, certification is a way to officially celebrate it instead of just having it all internal.

Simon : 44:02

Yeah, that's really what you're talking about. Sometimes it's a high level top down conversation, but often a lot of the innovation comes from a business unit level and if you can introduce that competition within an organization that that business unit is doing better than the other business unit, you can drive a lot of innovation through that. In fact, a lot of the early progression of sustainability within Unilever was done that way. It was localized business units in certain regions, really pushing sustainability and showing the art of the possible and, quite frankly, showing up other management of other business units that drove that internal competition to improve and do better and eventually then senior organizational management start to take note and go well. Actually, not only is this possible, it's driving best practice and innovation and efficiency and so on, and likewise you can imagine air quality within very large organizations being driven very similarly, that certain units are doing very well and can demonstrate that through a practical platform.

Simon : 45:11

Agreed, yeah, it kind of leads on to the ESG thing as well, and that is that buildings are assets and increasingly ESG is being driven by assets and the money, basically, and increasingly they want data behind the money and so far it's been very energy focused, as you'd expect, but increasingly we're seeing the S in ESG rising in prominence and having its own value proposition. Prominence and having its own value proposition are you starting to see that, in the conversations that you're having, that people are going? Actually, the value of these assets is going to be assessed, in part at least, on the impacts of health and well-being on tenants and therefore we have to start paying attention to it.

Stanton: 46:04

From what I'm seeing so far, the way that most so building owners and landlords real estate they're managed mainly by the accounting team. The most important thing is return on investment for whoever your thing is, return on investment for whoever your LPs are, and so they try to go for the safest option in most scenarios and they do play around a bit with some new ideas. Right now, from what I've seen, the big push towards ESG has been through a lot of investment funds who are saying we're only investing in real estate or real estate companies who can get to this minimum requirement, and they've been using tools and standards like GRESB to really set that baseline. Gresb does a really good job of just comparing all buildings across the board and, from what I've seen, there is no requirement.

Stanton: 47:03

It's harder to measure social than it is to measure energy or something that already has a meter in place because you're paying the bills for it. Most of the numbers that go into GRASP are utility bills or monthly numbers that you can just write in a spreadsheet and upload. Write in a spreadsheet and upload. But for health you would need something like air quality monitoring or something that's much more measurable, to have data for it, and that's a higher investment than just looking at the bills and writing down the numbers in the spreadsheet. And so I think there's still a ways to go, because it's not a hard requirement. And this is the hard part right now in this market, and it's that most companies don't have as much money to spend, and so they're picking and choosing what they're spending on and social, although it's more clear what it is, it hasn't been pushed to a priority yet.

Simon : 48:00

At least this is what we're seeing, just going to grab your attention for a minute. At least this is what we're seeing Just going to grab your attention for a minute. I wanted to quickly tell you about Lindab, a partner of this podcast. For over 60 years, lindab has been dedicated to improving the climate of buildings. I have known them and some of the great people who work there for as long as I have been in this industry. Lindab offers a broad range of products, from individual components to complete indoor climate solutions. Their systems not only promote better indoor environments, but also deliver economic benefits. If you're working on a new building project, lindap's high air tightness products and demand controlled ventilation systems are designed to meet the stringent energy efficiency requirements of today and align with environmental certifications. If you're renovating, lindab's smart units can upgrade existing systems, reducing energy consumption by up to 70%, with minimal impact on the building structure. Lindab's products meet the certification standards for BREEAM, leed, dgnb and many more, ensuring optimal environmental performance. And if you're looking to simplify your design process, their range of ventilation software and tools make product selection, calculation and performance evaluations quite straightforward. Creating healthy spaces is at the core of Lindab's mission, which is why, at Air Quality Matters, we are so pleased to have them as a partner with this podcast. Do check them out in the podcast notes at airqualitymattersnet and, of course, at lindabie. Back to the podcast and the.

Simon : 49:51

The thing that puzzles me in this sector as well is that, generally speaking, when we're talking about real estate and certainly standards like gresben and very much well and reset and others as well, is that in my mind's eye I'm thinking of deloitte headquarters and linkedin offices and you know tier one buildings really. But real estate is enormous and it as joseph allen it. It's a very large sector with a long tail and actually the low hanging fruit, the areas that we can have the most impact on health and well-being and positive outcomes, are at the lower ends of the built environment that don't have fancy Schneider BMS systems or Johnson controls. You know stuffing them and you know they're just the offices above the shops in the high streets and the units above warehouses out in industrial estates, out in cities. And you know these places have just been run to failure. They might have some air conditioning, some air handling units, but there's not a lot of smarts in that sector and ironically, that's where things like low-cost air quality monitoring and standards like Reset could have the most impact.

Stanton: 51:12

It's just backs the reset standard and our answer is nobody, because that's the reality, there's no government behind us, there's no large private entity that's adopting this or just backing us completely and funding us. And the reason why people ask this question is because standards conceptually, for at least in a lot of countries they think there has to be a government entity behind it. And without a government entity, why would I trust you as an organization, to set a standard? And so our answer is that there are two different types of standards. One is a government standard, which is the minimum baseline, for every single building or food product or whatever as being created, has to meet this minimum baseline. Every single building or food product or whatever that's being created has to meet this minimum baseline. That's what the government sets. They're not setting the high bar standards. The high bar standards, the ones that are optional, are set by private organizations or consortiums, etc. They're the ones trying to push society in a better direction, and what you're looking for in a standard is making sure that there's no conflict of interest and that whatever they're doing, whatever they're pursuing, makes sense from a long-term perspective, for whatever their mission is.

Stanton: 52:42

And for most building standards, what we're going for is either sustainability, health or both, and so I think the hard part is really just how do we get the message across that this is again, I think. For me it comes down to the DNA part, but this is not something you can really sell. You can't sell to the client. You got to build this in your DNA. It doesn't really work that way, and so, although that's what we're trying to go for, a lot of how we talk to potential clients is a step-by-step process on seeing how these can benefit your organization, fit your organization, and recently what we're seeing the most impact on is they have a there's well, right now we have two different client base that we think are very strong. One is a European client. European companies right now have a lot of requirements around ESG reporting to the government, and so there's a push on that side to collect more data, make sure what they say is defensible, and they see the tax benefits are going to come in the next couple years in the sense that they're going to be charged variable taxes depending on how they perform. They see that as a very strong possibility.

Stanton: 54:01

And then the other clientele is focused on storytelling. They want to be able to talk about what they're doing. That makes them stand out, and one of the least political. Okay, I need to take that back a little bit. I was going to say one of the least political topics is sustainability, but that might not be true everywhere around the world.

Stanton: 54:23

One of the least, I think, political in the business realm as in almost all businesses agree, this is something that we should do that's good for the world is sustainability.

Stanton: 54:34

So you can talk about your company's efforts in sustainability without offending most people and you can really bring. This is one of the topics where you can build a consortium around so competitors in the same industry can come together with initiatives that are sustainability or health focused. And very rarely can you bring all these companies, who are normally neck and neck with knives at each other's throats, from a business sense to come together and work together. And so the storytelling part is what is it that you're doing that's unique, and how do you tell it without being called out for greenwashing? And to do that you have to have strong data to back up whatever you're saying. And so that's the other group that we're starting to see, who have a story to tell. They want to make sure that whatever they're doing to collect the data is the highest quality, fully defensible, cannot be attacked in pretty much any way, and then they can comfortably have the marketing team go ahead and push it.

Simon : 55:37

Yeah, and the two lines across both of those is data. Yeah, you know, the storytelling is the difference, I guess, between fiction and non-fiction. You know the old days of sustainability, it was nearly all fiction, um, or at least aspirational at best. Um, you know, I've had conversations with fairly large real estate developers where they've said, look, the hard reality is now. The questions I was being asked five years ago were based around fairly vanilla sustainability reports. I'm being asked for hard numbers now, no ifs or buts like that.

Simon : 56:12

I have to back up with real, evidenceable data across every silo, from biodiversity to energy to social impacts, to, you know, the whole gamut of ESG and sustainable development goals. I have to be able to. If I say it, I need to evidence it. And you know air quality is one of the single biggest environmental risks we face. So you know it stands to reason that that should be evidenceable. Um, what's amazing to me, stanton, is evidenceable. Um, what's amazing to me, stanton, is largely what are we now, 24 so well, over 12, 13 years on from this idea of reset? You're still really the only game in town when it comes to getting low cost sensors assessed against something, benchmarked against something. Do you pinch yourself still that that's the case, that you've found yourself in the position where there's a market for such such a big market for low-cost sensors, yet internationally nobody else has stepped up into the fray for this. I find that amazing.

Stanton: 57:36

There is one other company who has gone in on this, but I think their approach is too lab-focused and so it is a different approach. But they're also certifying monitors. Now I think the main reason no one's doing it is because it's not a moneymaker. We do it because it's actually a requirement in our standard. We see a lot of other standards that are now talking about indoor air quality monitoring, and it's a one-line item. It just says indoor air quality monitoring, two points.

Stanton: 58:09

And there's no other specifics. No specifics on where you put your monitors, other than maybe something like 300 square kilometers per monitor, kind of thing of thing, and that's it, because they have no way to verify it. When we were building it, we went a little bit too hardcore into the tech. We said it has to be IoT, connected. These have to be continuous monitoring monitors that are collecting data at least every five minutes, if not faster, and all of this data is getting pushed to our certification cloud. So we have a cloud that's collecting data once every 30 minutes or every 24 hours of that daily set of data.

Stanton: 58:51

And so every partner that we work with, we work with monitors, we work with data providers, which are basically software platforms that can consolidate, summarize and send the data, consolidate, summarize and send the data. All of these different parties are required to kind of make what we do possible, which makes this really hard to do, because building an ecosystem in different parts of the world requires time and for the companies to pop up from that region of the world. Otherwise you're shipping monitors across the globe and it's not feasible for most companies to really grow their monitoring presence with that structure and so having that development happen without us instigating it directly is time-consuming. And the other part is just the way that we've designed our standard. Because this is necessary, we have to do it. But for other standards this is a small item and so they can point to us or they can basically say just do something along this description and you're good to go for these points, because that's not the core. It's part of a holistic, larger piece of the equation.

Simon : 1:00:06

For the other standards, yeah, and I think for context, for listeners, I think that's an interesting point to dive into a little bit. There are several elements to Reset Air. There's the hardware requirements, the accuracy and consistency of the products, but you also have a data aspect to this, a consistency of data, of a format of data, timings and so on and, as you say, you're not, it all comes into one platform. So there's a there's a consistency in what you see as a consumer from a reset air perspective, that it's all coming in with the same standard of technology and the same standard of data collection, and that's important and, as you say, probably hard to replicate easily. So maybe that's one of the reasons we've not seen others step in that they might be able to do the hardware and iso standard for measuring, an ndir sensor or something, but you've got to translate that meaningfully in something that a consumer can rely on.

Stanton: 1:01:10

Yeah, and the other thing is, to be honest, there's a lot more we could do on the monitoring testing side. But we also have to think about what is feasible from a market perspective in terms of costs, because, for example, the way we're testing right now it's a one-time test. We're testing not really the monitors that come out of the factory line, but we're testing the teams and the company's ability to create monitors that can hit these specifications. And that's why we require five monitors to be tested at the same time for three weeks, which is not a lot in the lifetime of a monitor, but it's much more than most testing requirements today. And it has to be done in a real life environment, as in. It's not in a lab where we're just spraying PM 2.5 at it or something.

Stanton: 1:01:57

And the reason like if we wanted to go a step further, we would be testing every single monitor coming out the factory line.

Stanton: 1:02:03

We wanted to go a step further, we would be testing every single monitor coming out the factory line. That would be the way to say reset certified monitors are hitting a specific certain quality, or every single one of them are hitting a specific quality. That investment is high in terms of us and also every single company who would want to get that kind of certification. And maybe it's feasible someday when we have better processes set up in factories, something that we can learn about in terms of testing and everything of that sort. So we have thought about it, but right now I think what we're doing is just the minimum for testing monitors. At the very least we're looking at the same brand and make, installed in one project will have will follow similar uh trends and similar uh readings, because they're coming from the same company that has the capability of building monitors are consistent against each other at least yeah, yeah, and I think that's very important for people to have a framework.

Simon : 1:03:04

I mean, you know, I operate in the academic world quite a bit as well, and academics tend to run around with their hair on fire if things aren't done to certain standards and to certain rigor.

Simon : 1:03:15

But that's not where this is and in lieu of this, it's the Wild West out there when it comes to hardware development and sensor technology.

Simon : 1:03:25

I mean, you know, if this is on video at some point, I've got, I've probably got four or five different sensors kicking around my office at any one time and you can get wild differences and very strange results. And if there isn't some understanding of why you might be seeing that, you know and, as somebody of my experience, scratching my head, sometimes wondering why I'm seeing the things I'm seeing consumers don't stand a chance. So it's incredibly important that there's a for all of the limitations of low-cost sensors and for all the limitations of testing. It's important that there is a framework that at least benchmarks everything consistently in the same way so people can be as sure as they can be when they're seeing numbers on reports and dashboards that it's meaningful and incrementally improve from there. So it'd be fascinating to see how that develops. I mean, we've focused very much today on air stanton but resets much more than that these days. If someone's asking you in a lift these days, tell me about reset stanton. What's your answer? What is reset today when asked?

Stanton: 1:04:42

so this has evolved a little bit over the past couple months because we've been thinking a lot about how our standards are evolving and what is our elevator pitch nowadays, and I think the closest thing we have. That's not even updated on our website yet, but we're here to help you on your net zero journey. This just needs to be kind of workshopped a bit more. But the general idea for this is that there are a lot of companies who talk about trying to achieve carbon neutrality or net zero or whatever, and the reality, I think, is most companies don't know what they're talking about, as in they don't know what it takes to get to that point Because they've never been making incremental improvements towards it, because they've never been measuring that incremental improvement. So without measurements, you either know you've done it or you've not done it, and so what we've seen previously. And going back to the campaign thing, there's a lot of one-off campaigns towards net zero, but that doesn't take you incrementally closer, because you don't know what incrementally closer even looks like. Closer because you don't know what incrementally closer even looks like. And the way that Reset is now designed, we have two sets of standards. One is for operational, so air, energy, water, waste. All of these are continuous monitoring requirements. Air is focused on health and it sort of applies to energy, because if you're measuring air properly then you can leverage that data for automation purposes for HVAC. Energy is one. In terms of carbon, we don't really think of water and waste as much because we don't normally measure that and so having a requirement for how you continuously measure those is also something that we've included. So that should cover, I'd say, 90% of carbon for a building from an operational perspective. And waste is interesting because we think of normally just the daily waste that a building generates, but some of the largest amounts of carbon that's being generated from waste is construction waste, and so if you add that up to it, then you start getting some significant numbers when you convert into carbon, embodied carbon, which is the carbon that goes into all the materials, how much carbon it took to build the materials and transport it and get it inserted into the building.

Stanton: 1:07:19

We look at embodied carbon slightly more holistically. We include something we call embodied circularity and embodied health. So we look at how likely it is. The two terms are source of life, end of life, which is how much of this product was from recycled content and then how much of it can be recycled afterwards. And the way we approach it for that end of life is very interesting because there is potential end of life so technically on paper what it can do in terms of where you could recycle it, how much it can be recycled, and the realistic end of life so technically on paper what it can do in terms of where you could recycle it, how much it can be recycled, and the realistic end of life, which is do you actually have a company near you who can do this for you, or is it just getting chucked, even though it says it can be recycled? So we started looking into that kind of stuff and something interesting that we learned was that if you really want to improve your embodied carbon, it's solved for circularity because embodied carbon there's only so much budget that you have LCA life cycle analysis.

Stanton: 1:08:20

There is a regeneration piece. It's an ABCD. In life cycle analysis there's four parts. There's ABC and D. D is called regeneration and this is basically how much of this stuff are you recycling? How much of this stuff can you get back into the system? So it's being reused in some way? Are you recycling? How much of this stuff can you get back into the system so it's being reused in some way. If you focus on that, you actually can decrease your embodied carbon score the most effectively with the lowest cost.

Stanton: 1:08:59

And then the last thing that we do is embodied health, which is looking at how much chemicals are in these materials. And one of our case studies was in an office. You're looking at multiple kilograms of chemicals in your space per square meter, because in a lot of the flooring and a lot of the gypsum board, the ceiling tiles, the chemicals are there. They're just hidden because they're between the surface layers and none of that can be recycled because you're not going to put it into the ground and poison the ground. And so when we're talking about circularity, you have to consider health, because if the chemicals in the materials are too, if there's too many chemicals you just there's no way to really recycle them. Yeah, that's the holistic approach. And the way that we're looking at embodied data is we're looking at every single product, we're looking at the data behind all the labels and the reports and stripping them out so that you can compare these against each other.

Simon : 1:10:13

How does all that fit in with the original philosophy of reset, which is this continuous monitoring? You can't manage what you don't measure. When you start to move into auditing, which a lot of the lifecycle assessment stuff is, is that a departure for you and a change in thinking and how you bring those two things together? There's always been an element of auditing within reset anyway.

Stanton: 1:10:35

It is slightly a departure if we're talking about continuous monitoring. Technically, our company started off as a materials company. That was what we were looking at initially. We were looking at the sustainability of materials and the health metrics of materials before we went into air quality. The reason why we looked at air quality with continuous monitoring was because we actually had a calculator that was measuring VOCs that were potentially off-gas for materials. And the calculator was never right, not even close ever. And the reason is because every single general contractor that we saw or every project we saw, the general contractor would switch out something, they would replace a certain glue, they would replace something and the VOC numbers are completely off from anything we were expecting. And that's when we realized none of these calculators will work ever, because you'll never get the full picture from a general contractor.

Stanton: 1:11:27

The funniest story was a general contractor being required to hit a recent error target. So then they started asking us for recommendations on every single material that they're going to use. But to get back to the idea of whether or not this fits into our philosophy or our mission, it does, in the sense that what we're trying to do is make everything more performance and data focused. So with most materials, when we think about how standards have looked at it before, the method of requiring better materials is you have a certain percentage of materials being used in the project having labels, so they're required to have labels to get a certain number of points. 15, 20% have labels and you're good, and oftentimes the requirement for the 20 or 15% is budget. So you just make sure your most expensive materials have a label and you're good to go. Most likely you'll cover your requirements.

Simon : 1:12:27

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point and obviously the challenge with materials and labeling is it's such a fast-moving sector and, quite frankly, can be quite a dishonest sector as well. You know, once a standard is improved for a phthalate or something in a material, they'll just change the chemical composition of that slightly so it doesn't come under that standard anymore, and all of a sudden you've got a slightly different version of the horror show of a chemical that was there before, because the chemicals industry have just tweaked it and now all of a sudden there isn't a standard for that version of it. Um. So I think measuring materials is really interesting, or measuring the off gassing and pollutants that they're they're producing is really interesting.

Simon : 1:13:16

I had a fascinating conversation with a lady called Karine Mandine, who's an epidemiologist, and she introduced me to a new term I only discovered in the last couple of weeks, which is the exposome, the last couple of weeks. Which is the exposome um? I don't know if you've even heard of that, but it's it's. You've heard of the microbiome, which is obviously the, the, the totality of the microorganisms either on it, on us or within the built environment. But there's a whole uh area of science now called exposomics, um, which is about the exposome, and it's the totality of your exposure to pollutants in your environment over your lifetime, and it sits very well within that type of a conversation starting to measure and understand the totality of exposure over your life to these environments.

Simon : 1:14:10

It goes back to what you were saying earlier about the well, does it matter if I was only in a room for two minutes with a particular pollutant? You know its impact on me is the dose, its toxicity and my vulnerability to it. Well, if I'm not exposed to it for very long, fine, but if it's only a small amount of something but it's in my residence and I spend 70 of my life in my home, that might become a very important exposure metric to me, um, so being able to measure this stuff becomes really important all of a sudden. So I think the exposome is going to be something we'll hear more and more about, because it's a, it's a, it's a part of epidemiology. Basically, it's that trying to measure your total exposure to these pollutants over the period of your life, which I think is really interesting. So, as of today, what, what is the? What is the structure of reset for people when they, when they're engaging with you. You have the operational side of it you were describing yeah so.

Stanton: 1:15:11

So we're modular in the sense that you pick and choose what you want to do. We celebrate whichever module you complete. So you could do air by itself, you could do air and energy together, or all the operational together. The operational rules in terms of process are all the same. It's there's a initial documentation on it, which is more around floor plans and your implementation strategy for monitoring, and then there's a site audit where you're verifying everything is actually installed in place that you said it would, and then there's a continuous data audit where you're sending data over to us to hold as a third party For air quality data. There's clear thresholds. For the other ones, they're loose thresholds in the sense that we're not setting them in stone, because we believe that every building has their own kind of targets and requirements and, especially if you're in different areas around the world, some areas or some use cases for certain buildings are going to be significantly more energy intensive and we're not in a position to we don't want to draw a very clear line in the sand for that. Instead, we're opting to request that, if you're going to declare a target, you make it public and if you pass great. If you fail you explain yourself on what might have happened because the climate change is happening much more heat this year than expected. All of those could be reasons, and I think we should. Part of what we're thinking and this is maybe a very terrible business decision, but part of what we're thinking right now is that we want more people to be comfortable with not succeeding, because this is going to be an iterative process to get to where you need to go and being able to talk about it. This comes down to the storytelling part as well. You're innovative and trying to be better and you're not going to succeed in every single element or everything that you're going to try. And all of these stories are worth talking about because it shows again the DNA aspect of your company that this is something you're actively working towards. And the key to telling a story where you might have not hit your target is to explain and share what your learnings are, what you've learned through it, where you're going to improve, how you're going to be better the next time, and that's kind of how we're thinking about that set of things.

Stanton: 1:17:37

This is not 100% set in stone yet. This is more me talking than the organization at this point. We still have to flesh it out internally. But the idea is, I want this to be more transparent, and, on the embodied side, all of us want it to be more transparent, because what's happening right now is a lot of these labels. There are third-party verified EPDs, environmental product declarations for carbon, but a lot of the health-related labels are self-declared, so no one's verifying it and there's no one verifying the exact percentage of everything either, and so it becomes very loosey-goosey in the sense that you don't really know how honest all this content is, because it's self-declared.

Stanton: 1:18:24

And what we're hoping to do is first establish rules for what information needs to be shared and then we tier it to self-declaration, third-party verification. First establish rules for what information needs to be shared and then we tier it to self-declaration, third-party verification. Having all that so that you can progressively improve your score, initially by self-declaration, then if you have the budget to kind of go one step further to get third-party verified, you go for that, and then, aside from that, we're looking also at the performance. So what is your carbon score? What is your circularity score? How much of this can be recycled? How much of it is using recycled content? How much chemical content is in the red list. Can you gradually remove this from your product. All of this becomes not just metrics that you're measuring, but in the long run, if your marketing team gets good, these are all stories that they can tell as you gradually improve.

Simon : 1:19:20

Yeah, I can see how that gives you pause for thought. I think what's interesting about that is it's so analogous to some of the more mature conversations we're seeing within sustainability, as we've moved beyond scope one and two window dressing and you realize the enormity of scope three emissions and if you're going to start reporting on that in any way, you have to change the dynamic of that conversation because it's a scary picture, particularly in the built environment yeah, I agree.

Stanton: 1:19:52

I think the just if we're talking like really far down the line, um, what we hope at some point is that governments take advantage of some of these concepts and implement it into their requirements. The closest one to implementing something like this is new york city, where they're starting to require buildings to report on how much their EUI is, their energy intensity, and if they are past a certain number, then they're actually going to be penalized from a tax perspective. So that's exciting. And the other thing is this is a dream for me, but if, if we get to the point where we're recognized enough that uh global energy companies who want to hide this um get start talking to us, that'll be an exciting day, because it'll really test us to see if we can maintain clear of uh conflicts of interest yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.

Simon : 1:20:50

Where does reset operate predominantly at the moment? Where? Where where's most of the real estate measured, uh, under reset?

Stanton: 1:21:00

so, um, right now we're across 21 countries, uh, in terms of projects, and in the beginning, it was mostly in China, because this was where a bunch of our tech team is based and it was also the only place that had the monitors and the data providers available during the first five years. And I think when we got to 2018 was when a lot of different monitors started popping up and it accelerated as we hit COVID the different monitors and data providers around the world and so that's when we started seeing a growth in other places. I think we're around 40% China now and 60% everywhere else. That's a big change.

Simon : 1:21:46

That's impressive and what's driven that Just being the global move towards this type of thing or, if you like, purposefully put teams and organizations out into different sectors to try and drive that growth elsewhere?

Stanton: 1:22:00

I'm gonna give credit to our aps. So, uh, accredited professionals who studied reset air in some way, they are typically there's. There's four different potential background for them. One is they are in a consulting company that helps their client on this front. They're in a design or engineering firm that, again, is promoting greener, sustainable, healthier buildings, and so they integrate it into their pitch. They could be part of the landlord team. So they're learning about what are some best practices, what are unique things that we can do. That's different from others. And then the others are stragglers. The most interesting one, a person who attended, might have been a financial analyst or a director at a consulting like a McKinsey style consulting company who wanted to learn more about what's going on with standards, and she was attending a bunch of these courses to learn more about it, and so that would be the bucket. That's not really directly tied to what's happening, but more on the auxiliary, just looking in.

Stanton: 1:23:13

Yeah the nosy ones yeah.

Simon : 1:23:15

I fit into that category. I did the well AP one just because I kept hearing about it and I went. You know what? The best way to learn is to actually go through and do it. The reset AP pathway is an interesting one. It's something that I've looked at. You do it a very different way. You're very open book with the material to start with, so anybody can go through the courses and the material, yeah, and then the only uh locked in piece of it really is at the end. You ask for people to sit down for the for the course, to do the, the course and the exam at the end. But everybody can familiarize themselves as much as any ap can just with the material that you have open. I mean, I've got my reset file on my laptop with all of the, the standards and the testing procedures and it's all there for anybody to see, which is great. Was that purposeful? I approach? Was it to open, book it to some degree?

Stanton: 1:24:10

We wanted it to be more. Initially it wasn't even called a test, it was called a practicum and the idea was that you're not there to really be tested, but to get comfortable with the process, with a proctor there to answer all your questions, which is still really what we're doing. So the difference between someone who has taken a test and someone who hasn't is they're going through a live project with one of us available to them as they're going through it so they can ask questions. And, number one, they get familiar with at least one of our team members Mostly right now it's me. And then the second piece is they're going through a real potential project where they're trying to figure out where do I install the monitors? What are the rules? Is everything clicking in place? For me as I'm thinking about this?

Stanton: 1:24:57

Because, to be honest, Reset is very, very simple. You're looking at just where you place your monitors and there's a few rules for that. There's very little things to memorize and the hard part really comes. Well, either before or after, depending on what the process is. It's once you have the monitoring in place. You have to start figuring out solutions. What we've discovered is a lot of places around the world they don't have a strong error solutions team around that area to do anything about monitoring. After you monitor, you need to do something about it. If there's issues, there's not enough companies doing that to solve the issue and so monitoring becomes just an exercise rather than a process to go through certification and solve all the issues.

Simon : 1:25:42

That kind of stuff and that must be very important for you because it goes back to the conversation we had at the beginning about the answering the what next question and embedding it in the DNA. It becomes a road to nowhere really for reset If you convince somebody to deploy monitors and get up on the system if there aren't the local, there isn't the local knowledge in place to do something with that data. When the inevitable questions start coming back about what's going on with meeting room two, what do we do with that and why am I seeing this data and the consultancy piece that follows as it goes?

Stanton: 1:26:21

yeah, one of our long-term goals is educational content. In general, we haven't been as good at developing it and pushing it out as we want to, mainly because we're always kind of just super busy, our team isn't huge, we're always pulled in multiple directions, and so there's a lot of work to be done. And, to be honest, we're also trying to flesh out all the other standards so that we can build these AP programs to help guide more people towards it. So that's part of it, but education is really important. The other thing that I think is important is the standard is still a standard. First, certification. Second, in the sense that we know there are a lot of people who use the standard but never certify because it doesn't make financial sense for them to certify.

Stanton: 1:27:19

But at the very least, the process for testing monitors, for accrediting monitors, and then rules for how you install these monitors, having those in place, make a lot of people more comfortable with getting this initially set up. And having that set up, having access to seeing some of the data, starts a conversation for what might need to happen next, and for a lot of buildings, a lot of spaces, that might be nothing, you might have perfectly good air. And then for the ones who have bad air, then this might be a conversation starter. The hardest spaces actually are public spaces that are sensitive to germs or flus, covid, that kind of stuff. So hospitals, schools are some of the hardest to get started. But having the monitor first don't even tell people that you're monitoring but having something there to start collecting data makes it so that you have data to work with to start discussing what might need to be, might need to happen next uh, it's interesting you say that.

Simon : 1:28:22

So there's a kind of a there's there's a few thresholds, and one of them is people might use reset monitors, they might use the reset approach and reset methodology, but they're stopping short of what the uploading the data onto the reset platform or going for reset certification or whatever ultimately the value. So there's a couple. Some people are stopping short of even giving you the data. Other people are maybe doing the data, but just don't do anything with it. Just they're not actively using it as such.

Stanton: 1:28:52

Yeah, and that's not great for a business, but at least in the general mission of what we're trying to do, it falls squarely within what we are trying to push the industry towards.

Simon : 1:29:04

Yeah, it's very analogous to me to the passive house standard. You know it becomes a brand term that we're building to the passive house standard but we're not. We're not actually using passive house designers, we're not actually doing the passive house certification or the quality assurance approaches, but it's become such a ubiquitous term that it's understood to mean a certain thing. It may find people are just set because of the branding, the success of reset, that we're using the reset approach. So we're using, we're using air things, devices we use, we're putting them in accordance with the reset, you know location of sensors and frequency of sensors and so on. We're uploading the information at the same timestamps and we're just not uploading it to reset.

Stanton: 1:29:50

We're not paying for the certification.

Simon : 1:29:52

Yeah, you just need to find a way of commercializing that more standard. You're missing a trick there somewhere.

Stanton: 1:30:00

The thing with. Well, when you mentioned Passive House, I also think that they are very mission driven as well, and I think they're doing amazing in the sense that so many people are implementing it. The one thing that I think is interesting more interesting than just the fact that more and more people are using them is buildings before leak a lot of air, and that made it so that air quality if outside air quality is good, it's not as big Air quality just doesn't matter because you're leaking enough air that it's diluting it. But with passive house and if we have more buildings that are designed well according to passive house or air tightness, that kind of stuff, air quality monitoring might be more important, because unless you have really good control over what materials you're using, um and and all of this ties into we're we're designing to be more efficient in terms of energy and as we design better for that, we have to have other implementations to solve for issues that we never had before. Before we had these um, better designs, in a sense oh, no, absolutely.

Simon : 1:31:13

And the complexity of buildings has improved, increased enormously. When you look at the chemicals and materials that we're bringing into a space versus 20 years ago, you just can't compare. You know you're talking about tens of thousands of chemicals and products into the average habitable room like I'm in at the moment, compared to 20 years ago where you'd have had hundreds, if not in the tens, of types of material. Um, now, don't get me wrong, there were some horrors in those small numbers in lead and various other toxic, but you know there weren't that many, whereas now now it's a thick soup of all sorts of complex structures and chemicals that's very difficult to untangle without monitoring. The other thing that that made me think of as well was that you know it's not just at the advanced end of the scale.

Simon : 1:32:04

I was having this conversation with a guy called Brad Prezant who's an occupational hyg hygienist but with a specialty in air quality. One of the conversations we were having was about lifting, moving significantly spaces from one place to another. So we're seeing that not just in new build, with pretty fast advancement towards airtight buildings, but we're seeing in places like australia and other parts of the world where traditionally they haven't had to worry about insulation and materials because the buildings did leak so much. But they are in the retrofit national retrofit program, significantly improving airtightness very rapidly in the stock and it's having very consequential impacts, particularly on things like moisture management in building.

Stanton: 1:32:49

So this is a conversation that I've had with our team many years ago and it was around what are the incentives to really get monitoring in more people's hands? So, for example, residential is difficult because no one's going to pay for continuous monitoring, which makes sense Like why would you? There's no story to tell for your own unit. But if in the long run, it's tied to insurance in some way health insurance related, where demonstrating that you have good air quality in your office space, in your home, et cetera, allows you to have a lower cost for insurance, that would be a very strong incentive for people to be monitoring. And having rules around how you display the data and all that stuff gets a picture of it needs to be submitted to your health insurance every month, et cetera, like that kind of stuff would be super interesting.

Stanton: 1:33:48

Because, number one, we are a society that is living longer, because we can now prevent a lot of diseases or at least extend our life for significant longer than before, and healthcare is going to be more and more expensive. And if we can play more into preventative medicine and prevent people from getting too sick, then we lower the cost of healthcare significantly, starting from earlier than later. And the hard part is how do we get to the point where health insurance actually can measure the impact of that monitoring to their deductibles or to whatever fees or however the algorithm works? Again, it comes down to ROI of health and it's hard to measure.

Simon : 1:34:38

Yeah, I don't think we're that far away from it as we think. I mean, one of the interesting things that came out of the work of Ben Jones and Max Sherman was that I don't know if you're aware of the work, but effectively they looked at all of the available literature on indoor air quality and its impacts on health, both epidemiological and toxicological, but also um the quantities of those pollutants we see in home and they combined all of that information effectively to come up with a harm index.

Simon : 1:35:12

I think it was 180-odd peer-reviewed studies that met the criteria for homes like ours, modern homes, and they looked at the harm that those pollutants found, harm that those pollutants found. And effectively the top five, which were no surprise really to any of us, put pm, formaldehyde, nitrogen dioxide, ozone and radon, um represent 95 of all the harm in a residential setting. So although there might be thousands of different vocs available, the reality is as if particulate matter is causing 75 of all the harm that you're exposed to in the home, then that's where you start, you know, from a logical perspective, am I really worried about toluene? I mean, yes, it's pretty bad, but if it represents 0.005% of the total harm that I'm exposed to, and I've got PM at 75% and nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde at 10% each, I'll start there.

Simon : 1:36:21

The interesting thing I was going to ask you when you were talking just there. The thing that popped into my mind was homeworking, have home working? Have you considered developing a reset, a home reset standard for, for for the workplace, because such a large proportion of the workplace now is working from home. It's a metric that, at an occupational level, businesses are going to have to deal with if large parts of your workforce are spending significant periods of time not in the workplace working particularly with the metrics we were talking about at the beginning, with things like performance and general health and well-being. It'd be interesting to see if those kind of reset type standards start creeping in to the home workplace.

Stanton: 1:37:08

We do have a residential standard to the home workplace. We do have a residential standard. It's focused on the bedroom and the main reason and anywhere that has combustion. But the main reason it's focused on the bedroom is because if you're at home, the place that you're spending, on average, every day, the most time in is your bed, because most of the rest of the day, at least for most people, you're not necessarily going to be at home.

Stanton: 1:37:32

Work from home is a different story, obviously, but the idea is you, just our idea initially was you want to measure wherever you're spending the most time in.

Stanton: 1:37:44

So, if there is a work from home, the only addition that we might add is wherever your home office space is. If it's not in your bedroom, if there's a specific room for it, we might ask you to have a monitor in there, and this is becoming more feasible because, like you said, the cost of these monitors are going down even more, and so it's easily feasible for a company to pay for the monitoring of the home, to make sure that you're at least manually controlling, controlling the air, to have good air quality and be aware that air quality can keep you more awake, that kind of stuff. So I think it's it's it's worth considering having a document that's more publicized. I don't think it's going to move the needle much for our certification business, mainly because this is again it's not a strong enough incentive in terms of what they can do with it afterwards to pay for a certification. But from an educational perspective it is a good, good topic to push on.

Simon : 1:38:53

Where do you see this next five-year block going? What was your sense?

Stanton: 1:38:58

I think my initial sense this is going to be from my perspective. I can't really speak for the company at this point, uh, but the the main focus that I'm seeing, or even actually the company is seeing, is most of the energy is going to be spent on carbon at least the next couple years, and it's because that's where all the incentives are. All the reporting is focused around carbon, either operational or embodied. All we're talking about is GHG protocol around scope one, scope two, scope three. There are some interesting aspects to this. For example, we've recently been talking with a partner about refrigerants, and there is a huge issue with refrigerants because it's not carbon but it is a GHG greenhouse gas. Because it's not carbon but it is a GHG greenhouse gas and there's no minimum standard for how you remove the refrigerants from all these systems when you demolish a building, as in more likely than not, it's just really sincere, so that might be actually really really bad and no one's measuring it, and really sincere, so that might be actually really really bad and no one's measuring it, and so that's something that might be interesting to require measurements for. It's something we're considering for an addition to the standard, just to see what we can do on that front. But I think the focus is going to be on lowering carbon, because climate change has become so visible and apparent to everybody. So that's a visceral piece, I think, that everyone's going to focus on, from investors to all the companies who want to tell a story around sustainability.

Stanton: 1:40:48

I think for air, the way that we're approaching it, that we're looking at how to approach it, is we have to tie it in with the sustainability movement that's going on. So how does a better air quality system facilitate better sustainability? How do we make sure that your building still feels good if you're trying to lower your energy consumption? And this ties into comfort? Co2 is partially comfort as well. That's going to be something that we have to argue for. And then PM2 and 5 and VOC is all part of long-term comfort. So the less sick that you get in a building, the more comfortable you are. So technically, all this is tied together, but it's just longer term less immediate impact, Temperature and humidity. You can feel immediately the health metrics slightly longer term. So I think that's going to be more of where the industry is being driven.

Simon : 1:41:47

I think that's interesting.

Simon : 1:41:48

I get the sense from what you're saying that it's almost as if air quality has to.

Simon : 1:41:53

I don't know if accept is the right word, but understand it's going to have to ride the coattails of sustainability for a while longer, certainly within the broader conversation.

Simon : 1:42:04

And I and I think there was a false narrative that came out of covid that actually air quality could stand on its own, um, and obviously on my focus is air quality, so I would argue that case, but, um, that there's death, that the conversation is definitely coming back to energy again uh fueled fueled in part, of course, by the, the fuel crisis, you know, and global conflict hasn't helped that conversation. I mean, nothing drops uh energy off the table faster than a global drop in fuel costs. So, like, who knows what the next five years will hold from an energy cost perspective. But the narrative at the moment I think you're right is certainly in one direction and that's back to energy and back to sustainability. It'd be interesting to see if the work of ASHRAE and those types of organizations starting to look at infection control and 241 and those kind of standards will have a dent on that conversation. Um, and the broad sorry, go on that's actually a really good point.

Stanton: 1:43:18

I I failed to mention that. What I was focusing on was really on the private side. Yeah, private, it's going to be all about sustainability, but there's a lot of opportunity for public to look at air quality, and I'm seeing that in some areas. So I know California has a lot of grants going out focused around air quality for education, so that would be an interesting kind of experiment to see what they can do with that.

Stanton: 1:43:46

The issue with a lot of grants, I see, is there's no measurement metric. It's more of have you done it? Have you implemented this system into the building? There's no test to see is this system successful. And so there is a grant that I know someone's been trying to drag us into it, where they help the EPA build a system for monitoring the schools that are getting the grants, where you're then testing to see how successful is the implementation of the grant, instead of just giving the money out and then not following up on it afterwards or more traditional public spaces will often be asked to push the boundaries from a public health perspective earlier than perhaps just the sustainability thing alone, because there's a public interest element to them.

Simon : 1:44:41

And you're right, education is front and centre of that, and quite usefully so when it comes to air quality, because the young are so much more vulnerable than anybody else to the impacts of air quality at an early stage, plus the kpi, which is cognitive performance, ultimately out of education, and health and well-being is so intrinsically linked to air quality, so it would make some sense that the focus is there if it was going to be anywhere. Agreed. Yeah, stanton, thanks so much for your time. You're clearly incredibly busy, um, so it's very much appreciated you spending so much time talking to me this morning it's been a pleasure, simon.

Stanton: 1:45:24

Thank you very much. Great thanks so much for your time.

Simon : 1:45:27

Cheers stanton, thanks for listening before you go, can I ask a favor? If you enjoyed this podcast and you know someone else that might be interested, do spread the word and let's keep building this community. This podcast is brought to you in partnership with 21 degrees, lindab, echo, ultra Imbiote All great companies who share the vision of the podcast and are not here by accident. Your support of them helps them support this podcast. Do check them out in the links and at airqualitymattersnet. Thank you.